Textbooks Finally Take a Big Leap to Digital

PARIS — Amazon, which got its start selling books online, announced this year that, for the first time, its digital books had outsold paper books. This trend of going digital does not hold true for all books: While many popular consumer books have successfully made the switch into the new format, textbooks are still widely read on paper.

Textbooks are gaining, though, as publishers take advantage of the popularity of tablets like the Kindle and iPad, expanding their catalogues and offering products like rental digital books that expire after a semester or two.

The potential for digital growth is leading publishers to experiment with products that stretch the boundaries of traditional textbooks, slowly turning away from static text and images toward a multimedia, intuitive approach, publishers say.

“Textbooks as e-books ought to be seen as a stepping stone to the future,” said Mark Majurey of Taylor & Francis, a textbook publisher in Britain.

Digital textbooks are any books that can be downloaded to an e-reader or computer or those that can be read online using a Web browser. While no one keeps precise numbers of digital textbook sales globally, a number of companies have seen similar growth patterns and nearly identical market share.

According to the Student Monitor, a private student market research company based in New Jersey, about 5 percent of all textbooks acquired in the autumn in the United States were digital textbooks. That is more than double the 2.1 percent of the spring semester.

Simba Information, a research company specializing in publishing, estimates that electronic textbooks will generate $267.3 million this year in sales in the United States. That is a rise of 44.3 percent over last year. The American Association of Publishers estimates that the college textbooks industry generated a total of $4.58 billion in sales last year.

Kathy Micky, a senior analyst at Simba, said digital textbooks were expected “to be the growth driver for the industry in the future.” Her company estimates that by 2013, digital textbooks will make up 11 percent of the textbook market revenue.

Though some textbook publishers made some of their textbooks available in digital formats a decade ago, it is only recently that the market has picked up. Responding to the new demand, many academic publishers have made almost everything they sell available in electronic format.

“All of our books are available as digital,” said Bruce Spatz, head of digital development at John Wiley & Sons, a major academic publisher.

Early textbook digitalization attempts were also focused more on specialized textbooks. But now publishers are looking at wider markets, focusing on broad subjects and students just now entering college.

“In general where the most money is made is in the introductory market,” said Ms. Mickey, noting that publishers were now focusing on supplying textbooks for first-year, introductory and core subjects — for courses taught to many students.

Other entities expanding into the market include Chegg, a major paper textbook rental company in the United States, which started offering digital, downloadable books this year. It announced in August that it planned to expand to become what it called one of the most comprehensive electronic textbook retailers in the United States.

CourseSmart, a partnership of five major U.S. textbook publishers that offers some 90 percent of textbooks used at North American universities online, announced its intention to expand overseas this year.

Perhaps the biggest change could come from the rise of electronic rentals. Digital textbooks can be made to expire — often between six and 18 months after the initial purchase — which means they cannot be resold like traditional books. Most digital textbooks also only license the first owner, and sophisticated software ensures that copies cannot be passed around. These measures help ensure that prices for digital textbooks stay well bellow the cost of the paper versions, publishers say, even though those who print traditional paper books might take issue with that.

“It might be a problem for the printers, but it isn’t a problem for the publishers,” said Bruce Hildebrand, who is in charge of the higher education sector at the Association of American Publishers.

Early this summer, Amazon announced that it was partnering with three major textbook companies to offer rentals of digital textbooks for even shorter terms.

When Amazon announced its program, which lets students rent a book even for 30 days, it said students could save 80 percent off the price of a new printed textbook. Amazon offers a service in which future rentals of the same textbooks will give students access to the electronic notes they stored on their device while reading the rental book.

Students say digital rentals can be good and bad.

“It was cheaper than actually buying the book,” said Rebecca Johnson, a senior at George Mason University, who bought her first electronic textbook during her junior year. She paid about 50 percent less for her digital textbook, which she bought directly from the publisher. But she pointed out that the digital version was not permanent.

“You have it for that class time, but you don’t have it forever,” Ms. Johnson said. Her textbook expired 180 days after she purchased it.

Jill Ambrose, the chief marketing officer at CourseSmart, says sections of rental books can often be printed off and kept. Also, most publishers will make the printed version of the textbook available at a big discount to students who have purchased the digital version.

For some students, the limited-time access can represent a real downside to digital books.

“I usually keep the book, it helps me with my other classes,” Ms. Johnson said. If she ever needs her microeconomics book again, she said, she will have to subscribe again to the online digital version.

Whether selling or renting, academic publishers are counting on the simple rise in tablet sales to propel the market. More than 40 million iPads have been sold worldwide, according to an Apple spokesman. Amazon does not release sales figures for its Kindle, but millions of units are thought to have been sold.

“The groundswell behind iPads in general could help drive the uptake the interest in electronic materials,” said Ms. Mickey of the Simba research company.

She cautioned that the release of the popular Kindle device in 2007 did not lift digital textbook sales much and that the enthusiasm for the iPad might not do too much to shift the trend entirely to digital textbooks.

“Electronic textbooks will eventually be the norm, but it’s going to be quite a bit more time than folks anticipate,” said Charlotte P. Lee, a professor at the University of Washington.

In May, Ms. Lee released the results of a study of graduate students showing that a majority eschewed portable devices after trying them for some months. Students complained that the traditional reading, scanning and note-taking habits — developed and honed by learning from paper textbooks — were not easily applied to tablets.

Ms. Lee explained that while the popularity of digital textbooks was sure to expand, learning from digital devices — especially standard consumer devices like the Kindle or the iPad — presented problems.

While traditional linear narratives, like those contained in a novel, can easily be transferred onto an electronic device, textbooks cannot as easily be transferred because they are rarely read from the first page to the last page. Ms. Lee said cognitive mapping of a textbook — knowing where certain information is contained, on the page or within the book — was needed to help students navigate such large amounts of text.

“We need to design devices that are specifically made to support academic reading,” she said.

Still, there are signs of growing popularity among students. In May, the National Association of College Stores found in a study of 655 students that 39 percent of students surveyed had used a dedicated digital reader, up from 19 percent just five months before. The association, which the represents campus retailing industry in the United States and abroad, said such results showed that a “tipping point” for digital reader technology among college students was fast approaching.

The tipping point seems to be nearing for some traditional sellers. John Lindo, who manages a private student bookstore at Pennsylvania State University, estimated that the store was selling 10 percent fewer paper books this year because digital textbooks had become so popular.

Though his store has started offering digital versions for download, Mr. Lindo thinks the switch will hurt brick-and-mortar stores like his.

Digital textbooks are “the beginning of the end for the college bookstore, because they don’t need us,” said Mr. Lindo, speaking of the students.

Correction: November 28, 2011

A previous version of this article misidentified the university where Charlotte P. Lee teaches.